Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion

Obama’s Catholic activist past

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About this blog

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the
...

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the MetroWest/495 area and spreads from there to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. You'll also find here lots of cross-referencing to columns and editorials in the MetroWest Daily News.

The blog presents an opportunity for readers to comment directly and immediately on pieces that appear on the print pages.

As I read the long New York Times piece about Barack Obama’s first job as a community organizer, I couldn’t help but think of our friend Jennie, and Frank Mazzaglia and others who revere Catholicism and revile Obama:

“American Catholic bishops responded to the call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the poor by creating what is now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups.

“By the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University, the campaign was financing a project to help neighborhoods after the collapse of the steel mills near Chicago. The program’s leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the black Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped, sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr. Obama, a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want ad for a job with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based program aimed to unify South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor living conditions and political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less than $10,000 a year.”

Read the story if you want to hear what people who were there remember about the years Obama spent working out of an office in Holy Rosary parish, dealing daily with priests and Catholic lay people. I find it interesting to remember when Catholic activists were liberal champions of the poor, not conservatives fighting culture wars. And I find it kind of ironic that people who ridicule Obama for being a community organizer forget that their church hired him for the job, and that those who ridicule him for attending Trinity Congressional Church give him no credit for his time at Holy Rosary.